John Deere, a manufacturer of agricultural machinery, can now handle a financial closing in minutes and can do predictive maintenance on its customers' machines.

By Eileen Feretic

What do you do when your existing operations system isn't meeting your needs? What if you need real-time information, but you're not getting it? What if you want to focus on global growth and help your customers become more productive?

If you're John Deere & Co., you move your SAP ERP system to SAP HANA, which unifies transactions and analytics on a single in-memory platform.

Derek Dyer, director of Global SAP Services at Deere & Co., headquartered in Moline, Ill., spoke about his operation at an SAP global press event on Jan. 10, at which the vendor announced that its customers can now deploy HANA as the foundation of the SAP Business Suite. The system captures and analyzes transactional data in real time on a single in-memory platform.

"We needed real-time data, and HANA has given us that," Dyer said. "It is bringing new innovation to our business."

John Deere, the leading manufacturer of agricultural machinery, can now handle a financial closing in minutes and can do predictive maintenance on its customers' machines, he added. The system has also simplified the IT stack, reducing Deere's total cost of ownership.

"We are moving from a manufacturing company to a solutions-based enterprise," Dyer explained, adding that the firm now has real-time analytics, real-time innovation, real-time products and services, and stakeholder collaboration. "We made the decision to adopt SAP HANA as a platform of choice for many of our existing and future applications." These include introducing new products and services, driving critical processes such as materials requirements planning in real time and doing predictive maintenance on customers' machines.

Ferrero is another HANA customer mentioned at the SAP event. “The first impression of SAP ERP powered by SAP HANA is that we can obtain significant improvement in terms of speed and usability by working with real-time information,” Enzo Bertolini, CIO, of the Ferrero Group, said in a press release. "We expect clear benefits in trade promotions and supply chain with better simulation and faster planning. The future we imagine is combining mobility with big data to transform the way we make decisions and manage our processes.”

"Potential benefits of SAP Business suite on HANA are numerous," wrote Ovum, a research firm that provides clients with independent analyses that help them make better business and technology decisions. "Obviously, HANA’s in-memory architecture accelerates routine reporting functions … But processing speed is the least of HANA’s potential benefits. The in-memory architecture allows data views to be generated on-the-fly. … [and] also allows analytics to be embedded with transaction processing, enabling companies to become more agile.”

“SAP Business Suite on HANA has the potential to be a game changer by making SAP much more relevant to its customers," Ovum wrote. "But in the near term, SAP Business Suite on HANA should be seen as an opportunistic upgrade for existing customers or a greenfield opportunity for new ones."